This invention generally relates to generation of a Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) list of data from community generated question-answer pairs, or other unstructured archived data.
Community-based Question Answering (CQA) and Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) data are similar in that both provide information using pairs of questions and answers. However, while services providing CQA data accumulate user-generated question-answer pairs, FAQ data is often manually compiled by experts about one or more topics at significant cost. Hence, FAQ data is usually concise, comprehensive, well-partitioned and written in formal and grammatical language while CQA data has varying quality in both language and content and is usually loosely structured and coarsely partitioned because of the large number of participants supplying data.
Maintenance of FAQ data introduces additional complexity by requiring one or more experts in the field of the FAQ data to monitor developments in the FAQ topic and the changes in the behavior of the users of the FAQ topic. Hence, conventional FAQ data is generally under-maintained and quickly becomes outdated. While CQA data is more able to be maintained, the large number of question and answer pairs present in even the most specific level of CQA data results in information overload. Additionally the quality of the content used to generate CQA data varies drastically from excellent to irrelevant. Further, the conventional category structure of CQA data is generally not specific enough to include specific relations for convenient user access.